Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Beaneball

Baseball enthusiasts take great pride in America’s pastime
because of its illustrious history and deep-rooted traditions. Baseball is
unique amongst American sports for its resistance to change. While video replay
and other technological advances have become commonly used in football, basketball,
hockey, and other sports, such innovations are used in a very limited capacity
in Major League Baseball. Baseball at the professional level has separated
itself in another important way as well. The MLB is the only major American
sports league that has not instituted a salary cap, meaning spending on players
is unrestricted. This naturally gives wealthier teams—the New York Yankees,
Boston Red Sox, etc.—a significant edge over their competition.

Enter Billy
Beane. “The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and
there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us.
It’s an unfair game” remarks Beane (played by Brad Pitt) in 2011’s Moneyball. In the early 2000s, Billy
Beane, the general manager of the cash-strapped Oakland A’s, changed the way
that baseball is now understood today. Beane is known for his development of
“moneyball”—evaluating baseball players on truly impactful statistics. Before,
players were evaluated based off of basic measurements such as batting average,
home runs, and pitching wins/losses. Players were also judged based off of
their age, mechanics, and other information that could be misleading. Beane’s
contribution to general management in sports was in finding a more precise
system of evaluation, based off of statistics, in determining a player’s true value
and individual contribution to the team. His new system eschewed market
inefficiencies and focused on player value per dollar.

Beane’s work became publicly
acknowledged in 2003 after Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game about Beane and his
methods. The book was converted to the big screen in 2011, in which Brad Pitt
played Beane.

Beane began
his life in baseball as a player. He was drafted by the Mets in 1980 but didn’t
make the majors until 1984. Between 1984 and 1990 he bounced back and forth
between the majors and minors and played for the Mets, Twins, Tigers, and A’s.
Despite his disappointing career, Beane became a scout with the A’s after his
final season and quickly rose up the ranks, being promoted to assistant GM in
1993 and then being named general manager in 1997. It was during his first few
years as GM that Beane fully discovered sabermetrics and came to realize the value
of previously overlooked statistical measures such as on-base percentage and
slugging percentage.

In 2001,
the Oakland Athletics won 102 games and earned a playoff berth, but after the
season Oakland lost several key players, including the 2000 MVP Jason Giambi.
While Beane admittedly retained a nucleus of strong players including Miguel
Tejada, Eric Chavez, and Barry Zito (a fact mostly ignored in the film), the
undervalued players that he and statistician Paul dePodesta picked up or traded
for (Scott Hatteberg, Mark Ellis, and Chad Bradford, amongst others) made the
difference in producing the wins that lifted the 2002 team to the top of the AL
West standings. Oakland would win 88 games or more until 2006, as by then several
other teams had adopted Beane’s methods. Theo Epstein, former GM of the Red Sox
and currently with the Cubs, used the moneyball technique to win the World
Series in 2004 and 2007. After discovering moneyball’s advantages, the Yankees hired
21 statisticians for their management office. A system originally invented to combat
payroll inequality is now being used by both rich and poor ballclubs alike.

Beane’s
story, from a creativity standpoint, is especially interesting in two ways.
Firstly, his technique of statistical analysis has meant that computers now
have a much more important role in player evaluation, at the expense of the
traditional method of using scouts to assess talent. Beane’s work has accelerated
Major League Baseball’s slow evolution, at least in one facet of the game. Secondly,
his innovative creation was a result of the constraints of his domain (payroll
inequality). This fact reveals how constraints can actually breed creativity,
rather than suppress it.

It is also
worth noting how Beane used analogy in his creative process. Gentner et. al. explains
how eminent artists and scientists oftentimes employ analogy, a system of
comparing and inferring structure between two systems of knowledge, to come up
with their creations. The authors focus primarily on Johannes Kepler’s use of
analogy. Another scientist of note who used the process of analogy in coming up
with his findings was Niels Bohr, who derived his sub-atomic model through his
understanding of the theory of planetary motion devised by none other than Kepler
himself. Beane, on the other hand, had studied economics during his brief time
at UC-San Diego before playing professional baseball, and he later put this
knowledge to good use. Beane applied basic economic models to the player market
and has admitted that Wall Street served as a guide for his work.

Today, moneyball transcends baseball. The kind of
statistical analysis made famous by Beane is now used in professional sports
leagues all around the world. While Beane’s secret is no longer his own, he
can, at the very least, be glad that his beloved A’s have regained the
on-the-field success today that made moneyball famous in the early-2000s.